And if you happen to bring a sign, keep it down so that the behind you can speaker. Our next speaker is Robert F Kennedy junior. [cheering] [chanting bobby] mr kennedy is an author and attorney whos been focused on environmental causes and childrens welfare. Hes a founder of Waterkeeper Alliance and a founder of the Childrens Health defense and now hes running for the democratic nomination for the presidency. Please welcome Bobby Kennedy to the soapbox. [cheering] thanks a lot, des moines register, and thank you so much to all of you for coming out here today. When i did my announcement in boston a couple of months ago, i talked about how my purpose in running was to challenge the corrupt merger of state and corporate power, which was strip mining the American People and destroying the american middle class, strip mining them of their equity, their wealth and ultimately their democracy. I am going to try if i got the time to talk about three examples of how that is happening, how that is impacting iowa and the people of iowa directly and the surrounding states. I want to start by saying i was in manchester, New Hampshire three days ago, opening our headquarters up there. And the last kid to come up and to meet in line to take his picture with me, said to me, ive never voted in the election. Im working for you here because i want to have pride in my country and i want to have hope for my future. And uh and he, he is worried, hes worried that hes never gonna own a home. Home prices have increased during these past two presidencies from 200,000 average home to 415,000. And in the Interest Rates are now going up five times so hes paying 10 times what kids were paying five or six years ago for the same home and hes worried he will never be able to afford it. Hes worried that hes not going to be able to pay off his student loans. Hes paying seven times what i paid in real dollar for my education and hes worried that hes going to carry that burden into his late adulthood. And today, 57 of the people in this country are not making enough money to pay for basic human needs. Thats food, shelter, and transportation. I spent a lot of time in the middle part of this country, representing people and representing 1000 families in columbiana county, ohio whose lives were upended by the Norfolk Southern spill. Im seeing americans live at a level of desperation, of depression that i never thought id see in this country that i associated with latin america when i was a boy. The average income now in america is 5000 times less the average income, 5000 less than the cost of basic human needs. And thats why over the past and 35 of the people in this country can no longer are no longer making enough money to pay for those needs. In order to bridge that gap, that 5000 gap, people are putting their debt on their credit card and the credit card rates, the credit card debt, personal debt this week for the first time in history exceeded 1 trillion and people are paying on average of 22 on interest. That if the mafia did that to you, it would be called loan sharking. But if the banks do it, its business as usual, and those banks are owned primarily by three companies, black rock, state street and vanguard. So they are now and over the year, weve lost 700,000 homeowners in this country. Those homes were bought up by those companies. Thats more homes than we lost in 2008. During the great mortgage crisis. Before in 2021 we lost 700,000 homes that are now owned by those companies. So home land, those people are now moved to rentals and the rentals are going up because of the pressure from those home, from home, those home ownership. So were seeing the land in this country, literally the equity that you need to borrow money. Americans need to borrow money so they could build businesses is being strip mined away from them. Here in the state half the , farmland is now owned by non Farm Companies and its being purchased up again. A lot of those companies are black rock, state street, and vanguard and smithfield of smithfield. I spent 15 years suing in north carolina. They invented a new way. They built a slaughterhouse, invented a new way of slaughtering hogs. They dropped, they went into business with wendell murphy. They dropped the price of pork from 65 cents a pound to two cents a pound. It cost the farmer at that point 0. 35 a pound to raise to kill eight. And they took over the whole hog industries. They put out a business, 28,000 hog farmers, they replaced those with 2200 factories, 80 of them owned by one owned or operated or contracted to one company. Today, virtually 100 of hog production in the state of iowa. Iowa is owned by that company. So you have the opposite of what Thomas Jefferson said was necessary for us maintaining our democracy, which is that our landscapes would be left in the hands of thousands, tens of thousands of independent human farmers, each with a stake in our system of government. We now have a colonial system. Here in iowa and around the country with land base is owned by a corporate aristocracy. A corporate kleptocracy who is using their control to control politics and strip mine the wealth from the, from the public. So this boy said to me, i want to be proud of our country. When i was a boy, i, i knew that the United States of america was the best country in the world. We had been blessed by god. I grew up in a period that is called by social scientists and economists the great prosperity, a 50 year period following world war ii. When i grew up in the sixties, my uncle was president. We had created greatest generator of wealth in the history of mankind. We owned half the wealth on the face of the earth in our country. When i traveled abroad with my parents, which i did often. People would come up and say ill do anything to get your blue jeans, american blue jeans, american bluejeans, american automobiles, transistor radios, rz a victrola, all of these american products. We invented them, we made them and everybody in the world wanted them. When i went to poland as a boy, it was a communist country. The communists didnt want anybody to know that we were there. My father went there against the without any invitation. They blanked us out in the newspapers. We went one day to visit the, the cathedral of the black mariah. There was nobody in the square when we went in and there was no newspaper notices. We went to meet the cardinal who was a saint who was a living saint. He had stood up to the communists. He had endured torture in prison, and we spent four hours with him. And when we walked out, there was a Million People waiting for us in that square, they surrounded our car. My father stood on top with three of my 10, 10. I think that time, siblings and myself and i was a 12yearold kid and i signed autographs for an hour. I saw the people with tears coming down their face, the electric response to the crowd because people all over the world loved the United States of america. One of the reasons they loved us so much was because we had avoided going to war. My uncle had told his best friend bradley, the principal job bradley asked him, what do you want on your gravestone. So, and he said, he kept the peace. He said the principal job of the american president is to keep the country out of war. I dont want african children and latin American Children and asian children when they think of the United States to think of a man in a military uniform with a gun. I want them to think of a piece or volunteer. The kennedy milk program, the alliance for progress, the, the usa id, which at that time was actually trying to build middle classes in those countries. We want to put america on the side of the poor. Because of that, theres more statues today of john f, kennedy or avenues named after more boulevards in the capitals of latin america, africa and asia than any other us president. And he managed to keep this country he never sent a single combat troop abroad to die. He sent 15,000 advisors to vietnam. A month before he died, he found out 75 green berets had died and he ordered them all home. October 22, 1963 National Security order 263 ordering all troops home from vietnam. A month later, he was murdered a week after that lbj remanded that order. And we have become a warfare state. I have a friend who is one of my best friends is a commercial fisherman, and i have, ive represented for most of my career as an environmentalist, commercial fisherman in and on waterways all across the country, litigating against polluters. Well, my friend worked his whole life in the commercial fishing industry. His son in law now owns the company, but he doesnt have a pension. Because its a hard job like farming, he is on 100 disability. He relies on food stamps. He got 283 a month in food stamps. And, but because of paying for the war, the 8 trillion that weve spent on wars all lost since 2000, the inflation rate is devouring his food stamps. So weve had supposedly 38 increase in food costs over the past two years. But the real increase of food stuff, of basic foods like chicken, eggs, and dairy is 78 . So his food stamps are 70 less than it was 2. 5 years ago. Well, on march 1 of this year, he got a robo call from the government telling him that his food stamp is being cut to 23 a month. He was already down to one meal a day, and 30 million americans got that call. 15 million americans were told they were being cut from medicare that month. That month, we spent over 113 billion. We topped it off, topped our commitment, 113 billion to ukraine. So, in that same month, we bailed bail with the fed printed 300 billion unanticipated to pay for the bailout of the Silicon Valley bank, so we have a lot of money when we needed for the bankers need it for the bankers or when we need it for the war machine, but we dont have it when we need it for regular americans. Now, Mitch Mcconnell, Mitch Mcconnell was asked about 130 billion. If you kept it here, we wont have to cut one dollar from medicare or food stamps. And he said, dont worry because its not really going to ukraine. Its really all just going to us military contractors, raytheon, general dynamics, boeing, lockheed and the other ones, well, who owns those companies, 100 of them. Black rock, vanguard, and state street, and if you look at the generals who are on tv, telling us the narrative for the ukraine war, which is complete baloney. If you actually look at where they work, the retired generals who are now working for those companies. So this is another way they strip mine the country. Im gonna ask Dennis Kucinich to come up here and make one little other point. [applause] hes like my vanna white. So im gonna tell you the biggest boondoggle of it. These pipelines that are now planned for the state of iowa. These are not oil pipelines. These are carbon pipelines that are taking carbon from ethanol plants and supposedly, and then theyre bringing them supposedly for deep well injection. But if you look at this, this plan which is owned by the, these pipelines which are owned by bruce, these plans end in north dakota near the well sites. But north dakota has said you cant do deep Oil Injection here. So we know what they are really doing if they are using this to ask racked more oil from those sites by pumping the wells. The same thing is true of this one. It ends right next to and this one is owned by black rock and it ends right next to the southern illinois, south of Springfield Oil field. So thats what theyre really up to. This is a huge subsidy to the oil industry. How much is it worth to the oil industry over a 12 year period, 173 billion in taxpayer subsidies. These are very, very dangerous pipelines. 80 of the people in iowa do not want these pipelines. 45 of the 56 counties through which they go have said we dont want them and have protested to the iowa utility board. But guess what, the iowa utility board is appointed by the governor, who is taken 163,000 from bruce and who then appointed the two controlling members of that board who fast tracked this project. So this is a project that the people of this state dont want. That is going to bankrupt our country, 173 billion. And that is very, very dangerous because the carbon when its liquefied turns highly acidic and it corrodes the pipe and if it gets so they have to use very special expensive pipe that is coated with chrome, but theres still leaks. And when they leak, the people who are affected can very easily die. So in 2020 they did the first one of these did a big leak near biloxi, mississippi, 49 people in the town were hospitalized. Some of those people have brain damage from which they will never recover. The ambulances and First Responders that came to the site, their engines froze because there was no oxygen at ground level and they couldnt, their internal combustion engines failed. So theyre endangering the people of iowa. They are making billions of dollars for the oil industry and for big ag and, and theyre doing this by changing the law to allow themselves the power of eminent domain, because these farmers do not want the line going through their fields. So they have taken the power of eminent domain. The fifth amendment of the constitution says that the government cannot take your land without due process and just compensation and they can only take it. They can only take it for a public purpose, but this is not a public purpose. This is a private profit making purpose. And the only way theyre getting away with this is by using a Campaign Finance system that is just a system of legalized bribery. This is this is supposed to help with Climate Change by isolating carbon. Two things about that. All of the republicans in this state who are supporting this and who have taken money from mr bruce dont believe in Climate Change. So why are they supporting this pipeline . Number two, the pipeline doesnt work. It doesnt we know that because adm which has another one, a third of these pipelines is 3000 miles of them all together, adm which is building the wolf pipe pipeline over here has another one that it built in 2017 in illinois, and its only succeeded in capturing 3 of the carbon from that company. So we know it does not work. We know the whole thing is a boondoggle. It was put into the law by Oil Industry Lobbyists who want another subsidy for the carbon industry. Pay 5. 2 trillion a year in subsidies to the carbon industry. Well, this is just more of the same, and this and this is a classic boondoggle by which these big shots, black rock, vanguard, smithfield and which is also partners on one of these projects are getting control of their land. Theyre turning us into a colonial model and they are strip mining the wealth and the equity from the american public. When i get in the white house, i will put an end to this and this pipeline will never be built. Thank you all very much. [cheers and applause]